Such unclaimed photographs, the AP explains, were typically picked up on the battlefields after their original owners had fallen, and passed down through generations. Only two of museum's portraits (which include ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, and tintypes) depict soldiers, and only one of those soldiers has been definitively identified as a Confederate.

Most of the others show children or families, though one is of Just Some Random Guy.

Now curator Ann Drury Wellford is hopeful that someone's great-great-great-grandson will see a picture on Twitter of, say, one of the dolled-up four-year-old girls and immediately recognize her as his flesh and blood.

The AP article doesn't say what the Museum of the Confederacy intends to do with the photos , apart from tenderly kissing them in thanks for this great free press, if they're unable to track down the subjects' descendents.

They'll probably just keep them for themselves, as they have done since they acquired them sixty years ago.

Then maybe a century from now we can circulate the images again and see if anyone recognizes them.